Linux without (?) Windows

This is mostly just a bunch of links and personal notes.

"Microsoft seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of the C2 rating for NT with no network connection. I wonder if a B3 rating for Linux with no power cord might be of value." — Michael Driscoll on the kernel mailing list.

Ubuntu install

I've been using Linux professionally for quite a while: first SGI IRIX machines in 2000, then custom-built RAID PCs with Linux, then Mosix clusters, then driver development which is much easier on the Linux kernel than on modern versions of Windows, and finally full fledged embedded Linux systems where every bit of the bootloader and operating system is under my control and not under the control of Bill Gates. But there remains the issue of my home computer with its 10 year history of upgrades and cruft.

Why would I want to change OS on a system that works fine with XP ? Well, really I don't. Except that Bill gates in his infinite wisdom decided that if I change too much hardware he will deny the license. I wanted to change the motherboard/processor/memory combo but was afraid to do so. Also the main system disk was always on its knees on its olden days 80Gb, never mind the other 2Tb of disk inside the unit on which I cannot just 'move' the operating system.

So when the system drive had a major brain fart one day in early 2009, I decided to skip a ski-mountaineering trips to jump ship and install kubuntu on a new hard drive, import my data, and then try to figure out how to replace some of my faithful applications and Windows-only hardware. The installation of Linux was basically painless, with only two major glitches: the lack of a proper graphics mode in X for my monitor and the failure of the WiFi.

So I had to give up on my Belkin DWL-G122 wireless which I replaced with faster and more reliable PLC (power Line Carrier) units. No driver necessary. Anyway, the wifi did work fine 2 years ago but now with the ubiquity of wireless ADSL modems, there are more than 15 competing networks in range, leading to crap performance. A note of importance to all those with PLC devices: don't plug them into surge protected power strips. Those will filter out the high frequencies used to transmit leading to abysmal performances.

Among the first things I noticed is that the keyboard is too fast, I often type dooublee characters. I briefly saw a kcontrol tab to take care of it, but it disappeared forever after the first sytem update (while clearly visible on other identical systems). Now all I have is this flimsy "xset r rate 200 30"

Knode for usenet, Kmail for email and Kontact instead of wab take some getting used to after using outlook express for 15 years. Thunderbird had a bug where links would not be clickable.

Imaging software

The main reason I held onto Windows for so long was my photo processing software: Paint Shop Pro, PTgui, SilkyPix, HS-V3, monitor calibration, etc... It takes years to get the most out of those programs.

So 2 years after the thorough review of raw processing software I did, I tried out the offerings for Linux. In short they are sub-par and I want my SilkyPix back. I installed it both in Wine (a Windows API implementation under Linux) and in VirtualBox (a virtual machine that runs a WinXP install simply). Both have pros and cons: Wine is faster but has some user interface hiccups. I did the same for PTgui and installed Paint Shop Pro in VirtualBox.

For scanning, the linux version of VueScan is flawless with my Nikon Coolscan 4000 slide scanner. But not so on the Epson Perfection V500. After reading quite a bit, I downloaded the DEB 32bit package [libltdl7] files from http://www.avasys.jp/ and installed them with sudo dpkg --force-architecture --install iscan*386.deb, never mind that I'm on a 64-bit system.

But for monitor and printer calibration, the expensive and shitty DataColor equipment is far from working. The software installs but won't run under Wine or VirtualBox. Linux won't recognize the Spyder probes by default, here's how to get it to work.

About VirtualBox, this system is awesome as it can pass an arbitrary USB device to the virtual OS, even if the Linux host doesn't recognizes it ! For instance I can use my Epson R1800 under Linux, or pass it to Windows when I need to make a profiled print. I also (try to) use the spyder probes through VirtualBox. Make sure to set the number of processors before you install XP, as it doesn't like a change in the number of CPUs afterwards.

Still about VirtualBox, how do you mount a .vdi file on Linux ? So you can for instance run a virus scan on it (all this must be prefaced with sudo): aptitude install qemu-utils; modprobe nbd; qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 Machine.vdi; fdisk -l /dev/nbd0; mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt; clamscan -ir /mnt; umount /mnt; qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0

Disk encryption

Disk encryption methods

There are several ways to do disk encryption on Linux:

Hardware level disk encryption

This should be the preferred method as it's OS agnostic. All you need is an encryption-capable hard drive and a BIOS that recognizes it. Most DELLs now come with that option, but apparently the largest disks don't have it and it requires UEFI boots which mess with Linux.

LVM partition encryption

Here the /boot partition asks for your passphrase before mounting your swap and root partitions. I will detail the installation method below.

Home directory encryption

This is available from the Ubuntu alternate install disk but I haven't tried it. Could be useful for servers with different users.

External disk or partition encryption

That's the method to use with TrueCrypt if you want large encrypted stores of data.

Partition inside an encryted file container

That's the standard way to work with TrueCrypt for small storage (for instance on a USB key).

Installing a new encrypted system

Where I work we are now required by law to encrypt all laptops. Since hardware-level disk encryption wasn't available to me, I used an LVM container. Very easy to install, with some caveats.

Boot with the normal LiveCD. Check that everything works and write down possible important kernel boot options. In my case I had a nVidia 3100M card that required the nomodeset option.

Boot with the alternate CD. Press [F6] to add the required options (you can type them in after pressing [Esc]. Start the install. Those options will then be transfered to the grub default.

At the partitioning step, choose Guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM

Near the end, do not configure the home dir for encryption as the whole partition is already encrypted.

After you reboot, check that /etc/default/grub contains your options on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line and run update-grub after any change.

Note: do not remove 'quiet splash', even if you prefer to see the scrolling text, as the passphrase will be asked by the splash screen.

Moving a TrueCrypt container from Windows to Ubuntu

On Windows I had an NTFS disk encrypted by TrueCrypt at the device level. I failed to mount it on Linux directly. Ubuntu would mount new drives via TrueCrypt, but not this one, saying it was corrupted with the very unhelpful message: "$MFTMirr does not match $MFT (record 36)". Mounting it temporarily on Windows, doing "chkdsk /F" on it then allowed me to mount it on Linux and copy its content to another encrypted disk, this time using Linux native ext3 filesystem.

Doing a backup and then data extraction of my failing former Windows disk was easy: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=WinSysDisk.img bs=1M conv=noerror. Then I can just mount that file as an ntfs partition and copy its content over.

Servers

One of the reasons I wanted to move to Linux was the ease of installation. Yes, times have changed ! On Windows you install the OS and reboot. Then install the security updates and reboot. Then the service packs and reboot. Then the various system update and reboot. Then the secondary updates and reboot. Then at this stage you still you have a unusably bare system and you need to google for all the current versions of your usual software, download them, install, reboot, launch, customize. Damn, that license doesn't work anymore with the new version, etc... Usually it takes me a good 3 days. I've wasted months of my life installing windows and associated software according to this method.

Linux makes it all so much simpler: you install the OS and reboot. The installer pops up with updates; apply and reboot. So far, not much difference. Then you launch the application installer and select all those you want. Click OK, that's it, no reboot necessary. And each time there's a new version of either the OS or the various applications, the updates are automated and all together. Magic.

For years I had a LAMP stack running on Windows: Apache web server, Php, MySQL server, PhpMyAdmin, gallery2, svn, etc... All very delicate to install and keep up to date. On Linux you just click them in the installer and then all you need to do is fine tune their config files according to your needs.

My former svn repositories required a bit of massaging to move to Linux. I had to run the following on each of them: svnadmin recover /path/to/repos and just ignore the errors. I miss TortoiseSvn though, although KdeSvn is not bad and learning the command line for basic stuff is no biggie.

By the way, it is a good idea to pass the /etc directory under version control. All your critical system configuration files are there and you never know if a silly upgrade will break things. For this you first create an etc repository in your svn server directory: svnadmin create /var/www/SVN/etc (as www-data, not as root). Then you create an empty etc directory somewhere (not in '/') which you check out as root: cd /tmp; sudo svn co http://localhost/svn/etc. You then move the .svn to the real /etc and delete the temporary one: sudo mv /tmp/etc/.svn /etc/; sudo rmdir etc; cd /etc; sudo svn add ...; sudo svn commit when you can add whatever /etc files you fancy under version control. Always remember to sudo before svn'ing anything in /etc

Installing the ssh server is a no brainer, just remember to NAT port 22 on the router.

I got VNC to work in order to remotely access my Ubuntu box the following 4 steps:

From the local system, log into the remote ubuntu box with a ssh tunnel on the VNC port (here I also have a X tunnel in case I want to use both VNC and X): local $ export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0; ssh -XCL 5900:localhost:5900 user@remoteubuntubox.dnsalias.com This works also from Windows/cygwin.

Run the VNC server telling it to accept connections coming from localhost (remember, it's being tunneled through ssh, so you don't need to mess up your security by opening a NAT port in your router): remote $ x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0

The server is all set, now just start a VNC client on your local machine (give 'localhost' as the IP/hostname of the machine to connect to, port 5900), TightVNC client works great on Windows. If on another Ubuntu box, you can type local $ vncviewer -encodings "tight" localhost:0

nVidia drivers

Here's just the summary of what needs to be done when you do a sudo aptitude full-upgrade, receive a new kernel and then end up with a text terminal because you broke the nVidia driver kernel integration. First you must have downloaded a recent NVIDIA driver, which may be hard to do in text only.

Formatting a large drive (≥3Tb)

If you use fdisk, the default is still to use DOS (!) partition tables, limited to 2Tb. So use GParted, then go into [Device][Create Partition Table] and select [gpt] from the list. Then proceed as usual.

Office stuff

By now everybody knows that OpenOffice is a perfect replacement for MS Office: it's free and it doesn't have the horribly messy ribbon menus of Office2007. And it can open tab separated .csv files !

Changing motherboard

So shortly after installing, I tested two of the reasons why Linux can beat Windows to a pulp. First one is a complete motherboard+processor+memory change. I had a Tyan mobo with Athlon 64 X2 with the AMD64 version of Ubuntu, so I had to stay in that line. I got a different brand of mobo (AsRock), more cores and 4 times the amount of memory. Assemble, put the old drive in... and it boots without even a tweak of the BIOS or GRUB. And it doesn't bring up a message telling me that either I copied Windows illegally or that I changed too much hardware, either way pay up, thank you bitch.

The only hitch is the ethernet driver that no longer works. I have to compile a slightly different version, which took all of 5 minutes, but then the next kernel upgrade fixed the issue... So now it's a non issue.

The second test was upgrading the hard drive. This time I used a Knoppix live CD to boot, used dd to copy one partition to the next drive and then enlarged the partition to fill the whole drive. Rather painless.

Various annoyances

What is the command line to get the content of the clipboard ? Or to pipe something in it ? In cygwin I used it very often, for instance to sort the content of the clipboard getclip | sort | putclip I'm aware that there are two different clipboards in Ubuntu, the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V KDE facility and the select/middle-click ancient X-clipboard, so if they are two different commands, that's OK... but I couldn't find them !

Couldn't get KDevelop to compile even a simple hello world. I'll stay with makefiles for now.

The sound works fine, including the multimedia keys of my old Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard... somehow. The volume up and down keys would raise the PCM volume used by most apps, but Amarok uses the separate Master channel. The solution is to go in [System settings][Keyboard & Mouse][Global][Kmix] and to change the key assignment from [Decrease Volume] to [Decrease Volume - Master ...]. There may be more than one choice, try them out. Do the same thing for the [Mute] key.

The default sort order of konqueror/dolphin file manager makes no sense to me: it sorts A, _B and C in that order, instead of the correct _B, A, C. I can find no information on what characters are ignored or treated peculiarly. Fortunately they recently added the ability to avoid this 'natural sorting of items' in [Settings][Configure Dolphin][General][General]

I write daily in 3 languages but I prefer a US keyboard for programming. Unlike Windows there's no magical set of keys that will type any char: on any Windows box since at least version 3 I can do Alt+135 for a 'ç' and it will work on any keyboard setup and any installed language. On Linux I can define custom actions to bring a specific char, but it needs to be configured on every PC... I can add foreign keyboards and try to remember the key positions, sell my firstborn for an Optimus keyboard, or use the more useful 'US'intl' keyboard for accents. I don't like the Intl keyboard much because you need to use the mouse to activate the keyboard, and also some keys are missing, like the 'ç'. Besides using intl keyboard, I found that the best solution is to use the Caps Lock key as a Compose key. You go in [System Settings][Regional & Language][Keyboard layout][Advanced][Compose key position] and select Caps Lock. Now when you press [Caps lock] at the same time than ` and then e, you'll get a è, same thing with [Caps lock][,] followed by C which'll give a Ç. It works with various combinations of ' " , . ` ^ ~ as first character and just about anything as a second character. You get the picture. See below for more keyboard tricks.

Finding hardware devices can be daunting. Here's a list of commands that do it in different ways. Some of those need you to be root and some reside in /sbin/ and some are not installed by default:

lshw

List hardware

lshal

List Hardware Abstraction Layer devices (currently being phased out)

lspci

List PCI cards

lsusb

List USB devices

lsscsi

List SCSI devices

lsblk

Show block devices in tree form

systool

Part of sysfsutils

hwinfo

For instance use sudo hwinfo --framebuffer to get the vga codes of your video card to pass to the kernel as vga=xxx in /boot/grub/menu.lst

fdisk -l

List hard drives

dmidecode

Get info from bootloader

dmesg

Boot messages, check this if you can't find a device that you expect

lstopo

Topography of processor(s), caches and memory (better than lscpu)

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Processor information

cat /proc/meminfo

Current memory status

lpstat

Printer information

Other experimentations

As long as I'm doing big changes, I might as well keep going. After all, KDE is a window manager not unlike Windows ! There are other window managers that operate on completely different principles. I tried 'Awesome' which is an interesting concept... except that with the utter lack of a tutorial, I couldn't even figure out how to close an application, or hide it, or fullscreen it, or anything except drop to a console and kill it.

Some very useful software:

gdmap

File space viewer.

gpsprune

GPS trace cleaner, very simple and nice but doesn't allow for moving trackpoints (should be in future versions).

Use it to recover images from deleted/formated memory card. Use is very easy: plug in your card but don't mount it, use dmesg to see which partition it uses, like sdh1, launch sudo photorec -d /tmp/pr /dev/sdh1 and follow the menus.

unetbootin

Use it to create a bootable USB key from a CD .iso file. Install UnetBootin, download the Ultimate Boot CD ISO, use UNetBootIn to write it to a USB key, also copy your firmware flash executable on it, boot with it, select FreeDOS, type C:, run the flash utility.

shotwell

Photo manager and downloader from camera.

SIR

Simple Image Resizer

Smartshine

Photo luminosity adjustment

SmartDeblur

Image sharpening tool

Urban Lightscape

Enhances local luminosity.

Tintii

Color separation

Fotowall

Image disposition

Luminance-HDR

Creates high dynamic range images

PhotoPrint

Print multiple images

Shortcut keys in bash

Ctrl-L

Clears the screen, same as clear command

Ctrl-U

Clears the line before the cursor position

Ctrl-K

Clears the line after the cursor position

Ctrl-W

Delete the word before the cursor

Ctrl-T

Swap the last 2 character before the cursor

Esc+T

Swap the last 2 words before the cursor

Tab

Auto-completes command and files names. See complete command

Ctrl-R

Search through previous commands

Ctrl-C

Interrupts whatever is running

Ctrl-Z

Pauses whatever is running and puts it in the background. Usually followed by the bg command to let it continue running in background. Also see jobs and fg.

Ctrl-D

Exit the current shell, usually used as cat >>somefile[Enter]Type something[Ctrl-D]

Getting offline Geoportail 1:25000 french maps on android phones

Install mobac: sudo aptitude install mobile-atlas-creator

Put the following Geoportail.bsh file in the directory ~/.config/mobac/mapsources/ which appears after the first run of mobac.

Run mobile-atlas-creator, select [IGN Geoportail maps] in [Map Sources], select the zoom levels 15, 13, 11 and 9. 15 is the actual 1:25000, 16 would be the same as 15 but zoomed which you may want on very high resolution screens. Add a new Atlas in OruxMaps format, give it a name. Select an area by dragging on the map (start small, check the number of tiles that will be downloaded). Press [Add selection]. Press [Create Atlas] and wait a few hours.

You can now find your tiles in the directory defined in [Settings][Directories][Atlas output directory]

While you are in [Settings] you may want to limit the download speed.

Now install OruxMaps on your android phone, run it once to create the storage directories, then connect your phone to your PC and copy the whole directory created above under /Internal/oruxmaps/mapfiles/...

...or if you want them on the external SD card, under /SD card/Android/data/com.orux.oruxmaps/mapfiles (or /SD card/Android/data/com.orux.oruxmapsDonate/mapfiles, depending on which version you have) and then open OruxMaps, go in Settings / Global Settings / Maps / Maps Directories, navigate to /SD card/Android/data/com.orux.oruxmaps/ and double-tap mapfiles to select it.

Now when you start OruxMaps and zoom at one of those levels within the area, the map should appear.

This discussion also has other .bsh files for Geoportail satellite images, coastal maps and cadastral maps.

Note that if the area you selected is too large (in terms of horizontal pixels), OruxMaps won't use the map. Bug ? Computing limitation ? I couldn't get the entire french Alps at once, had to divide them in narrower areas.

The Parent Experiment

A couple months after I started using Ubuntu as my main PC, I was in my parents home, upgrading their old computer. New mobo, new HD. Of course XP refused to restart after I clone the disk. So I start the painful install / configure / patch process. After 24 hours and everything nearly ready, SP3 crashes during its post-install. The whole install is now a brick. It's sunday afternoon and I leave in an hour...

I go in a rage, I put my Kubuntu install CD and after 30 minutes I have the full system and all its applications up and configured. I spend the rest of the allotted time to customize the system: obvious icons on the desktop to firefox, Redmond theme to ease the transition, kmail (with the old messages imported), Xsane for the scanner, OpenOffice, Dolphin, Gimp, my image import script and the few other apps they are likely to use such as ViewScan. I rename some of them to make it clear what they do or to the same name they had in Windows. I setup ssh so that I can login remotely to fix issues. And I leave, only telling them that with the new upgrade things will be a 'little different'. I cross my fingers on this understatement, waiting for the complaints calls to pour in.

After 2 weeks, I get the first call: "Yeah, it works fine but we don't have Skype anymore". Clickety click, ssh login, install. Done. "Is that it?". "Yeah, pretty much". I consider this experiment widely successful.